Hello Cool World is excited to be working on the media relations for Occupy Love, an inspiring new documentary from award-winning Canadian filmmaker Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred, Fierce Light). Occupy Love explores the cultural uprisings of our time from the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring to the European Summer and environmental protests and asks the question, “How could the crisis we are facing become a love story?”.

Occupy Love is being self-distributed by a talented team led by Velcrow and producers Nova Ami and Ian Mackenzie. Their crowd sourced, social media driven approach to distribution is consistent with the theme of the film, which successfully raised $80,000 through the crowd-funding platforms IndieGoGo and Kickstarter!

The global response to the film has been amazing with over 200 grassroots screenings being self-organized by individuals and organizations in over 25 countries, and more being added every day. The largest community screening so far took place in Porto Allegre, Brazil on April 11th attracting a whopping 1,500 attendees!

We worked on outreach and DVD production for Scared Sacred. As with our work with The Corporation, and The Take, we've been inspired by how films with a social message, can find audiences and inspire those audiences to action. All these films are available on our webstore, and all our profits go to our campaigns, and now also to the distribution platform for social cause media we are developing. Check out our proposal to CFC's IdeaBOOST program, and please BOOST us, our dream is to better help films like Occupy Love engage with audiences, and to encourage audiences to organize actions as well as screenings.

At Hello Cool World we really are dreamers, and it's a good thing too. We dream of tools for social change, amplification engines for all our visions of alternative futures. The dream is what keeps me going.

There is a story behind every dream. Since I learned to read (such a long time ago), the technology that is the alphabet changed my life forever. But I also had the first massive moment of facing my limits because I had always assumed that once a person learned to read, they simply went on to read all the books. Which is what I set out to do.

The moment when I realized I could never read all the books was devastating. I also discovered there were more languages than I could ever learn. The tower of babble fell on my five-year old self, already drunk on fermented knowledge apples. It was one of my most profound moments, the friction between desire and reality, and I never recovered from learning my personal limits.

Since then I have been obsessed with systems. And collaborations. Things that help people do more than what they can do alone. And which is why, in such a personal way, I fell in love with the possiblities of the internet.

When we began working on The Corporation over a decade ago, our dream was to mobilize a grassroots network that connects audiences to ideas and actions. I remember excited conversations with Mark Achbar, before the film was even in production, about grassroots outreach and the possiblities of email. We were excited about websites and heady over hypertext. It was a time when blogs barely existed, and Facebook and Twitter were years away.

But the people and projects behind the technology were the point all along. What I fell in love with was the power of connecting people. We had a grassroots hit on our hands armed with little more than an email list. As we foraged forward, we built the technological infrastructure to go with it, a centralized platform to create and launch campaigns. We always liked to say that our platform balanced content, technology and outreach.

And I could not have done ANY of this alone. Films take teams of people. So do websites, databases and strategies. What we built in the early days (with the strategic advice of Scott Nelson and the hands-on help of Phillip Djwa, followed by David Griffith, and more recently with Atef Abdelkefi & Sandy Haksi), has been serving us well.

But now, we at Hello Cool World are up against the limits of our old code, and in the face of new frontiers it's time to BOOST our platform to new heights. In a way that will offer the economy of scale to our potential user and investors.

This platform connects all the work we have been doing. We are putting into practice everything we have learned before, during and after the launches of The Corporation and other documentaries The Take, Scared Sacred, and 65_RedRoses, as well as from book projects like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Picturing Transformation, Nexw-áyantsut, the book I am co-writing (with Chief Bill Williams and Nancy Bleck) for the Uts'am Witness Project. We're drawing on our experience with LACE Campaign, promoting cervical cancer awareness, and our many sexual health campaigns and cross-cultural projects, all of which require mobilizing and connecting people around a cause. We're proud of what we've accomplished and if we can scale it up, we believe we can do more good for more people.

We are a mission driven social venture business! So what exactly does that mean? We drafted a small flyer before our trip to Bioneers that connected our business vision to some of our projects that will be our priorities in the coming year.

For Hello Cool World, campaigns are mission critical. Whether we are using a film to launch a movement, or creating a campaign from the ground up, we care about the long-term engagement of communities around a cause.

As social entrepreneurs we run a triple bottom line company. As film distributors we are defining fairer trade for films with a social message. We offer a higher return to filmmakers and use our profits to sustain campaigns.

We are the Canadian distributor for 65_RedRoses, the award-winning documentary about Eva Markvoort. Tomorrow we will be shooting interviews with directors Nimisha Mukerji and Philip Lyall, Cyrus McEachern,Eva's friend and collaborator on the photo project that has become the heart of our upcoming campaign.

65_RedRoses chronicles Eva’s battle with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) and the double-lung transplant that gave her two more precious years of life. Tragically Eva lost her battle with CF at only 25. Her legacy is 65RedRoses.com, the film and campaign for organ donation and CF Awareness she helped create – Live Life. Pass it On. #4Eva.

Modelled on our partnership with BC Transplant, we are spearheading a global awareness campaign. Our vision includes community screenings across North America to support the upcoming US premiere on OWN.

It started with a simple call in Adbusters, a Vancouver based anti-consumerist magazine, and once the workplace of Hello Cool World's own Katherine Dodds, senior graphic designer Terry Sunderland, and photographer Nancy Bleck. The copy was to-the-point: “Occupy Wall Street. September 17. Bring tent.” Since that call to action, thousands of cities around the world have been rallying together in support of the occupy movement.

This past Saturday, October 15, the movement reached Vancouver and Hello Cool World was there to cover the event. With Bella Sie and a camera in tow, we hit the crowd to learn about what was on the people’s minds. Numerous social, economic, and political ideas were being shared. The talk of “change” was a constant and the vibe of the crowd while being incredibly peaceful and happy – it was clear motivation was in the air.

This movement has sparked a dialog though a gambit of people. Young to old voices are hitting the streets. The occupy movement has inspired various groups of people to band together and collectively bring awareness to the fundamental problems that plague society. At Occupy Vancouver I had a chance to speak with a lady named Galena. She was there with her fiancé Bruce, both holding signs stating that they are the 99 %. The 99% of the population that is not satisfied with the way our governments have been governing. They were not alone - fellow occupiers discussed the issues of corporate greed and the destruction of our natural resources. Overall the issues that were being discussed were important and vital to our communities. When you want to help people it is never a negative thing to stand up for what you believe in.